When you can make anything, the job is knowing what's yours

A few weeks before its show in Milan this year, Gucci filled its Instagram with AI images. A satellite in space, a horse on a beach, a sports car that looked lifted from a video game, a woman in a fur coat at a café. None of it was bad, exactly. It was just everything, and nothing in particular. The comments called it cheap and lazy, and one line stuck with me: someone asked why Gucci couldn't find a real Milanese grandmother to wear an outfit from 1976.

The complaint was barely about the technology. It was a brand looking like it had forgotten what it was for.

My view is simple. Now that making things costs almost nothing, the valuable skill has moved from making to judgement: knowing what belongs to your idea and having the nerve to leave everything else out.

The library with every book in it

In 1941 Jorge Luis Borges wrote "The Library of Babel," a story about a library that holds every possible book. Every combination of letters, every page, in every order. It sounds like paradise until you realize what it means. Somewhere in there is the perfect book, surrounded by an almost infinite number of near misses, and nobody can find it. The librarians go a bit mad.

Generative tools have handed every designer their own Library of Babel. Ask for a logo and you get forty. Ask again and you get forty more. Making options has become the easy bit, and choosing between them has quietly become the whole job.

There's research on this too. In a well-known study from 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a jam tasting in a supermarket. With 24 flavors on the table, more people stopped. With 6, far more people actually bought. Barry Schwartz later built a whole book around it, The Paradox of Choice. More options feel like freedom and usually end in paralysis or a worse decision.

Taste is the gap

Ira Glass has a short talk that gets passed around design studios, usually called "The Gap." His point is that beginners get into creative work because they have good taste, and the painful early years are the gap between that taste and what they can actually make. You close it by making a lot of work.

AI has done something strange to that gap. It has closed the making side for almost everyone, overnight. What's left exposed is the taste side. When anyone can produce something polished in seconds, polish stops meaning much. What people notice instead is whether the thing has a point of view, and whether it fits.

That's why "good enough" is suddenly a problem rather than a relief. There's more of it than ever, and it all looks a bit the same.

A brand world is a set of refusals

The brands I admire most are defined as much by what they won't do as by what they will. Dieter Rams summed up his approach at Braun as "less, but better." Steve Jobs, back at Apple in 1997, told developers that focus means saying no to the hundred other good ideas. Neither of them was talking about minimalism as a look. They were talking about discipline.

Look at the brands that handled AI well this year. Aerie ran a campaign with Pamela Anderson in which she asks an AI tool for "natural" models and gets lifeless results, ending on "Real matters." It worked because it wasn't a stunt. Aerie stopped retouching its models back in 2014 and pledged in 2025 never to use AI-generated bodies. The campaign was just the brand being itself, loudly. Equinox did something similar in January with "Question Everything But Yourself," pairing unretouched members against warped AI images. Again, it fit. A gym that sells real effort has every reason to distrust shortcuts.

Gucci could have used any tool it liked. The trouble was that the images belonged to no one. A house built on Italian craft and a very particular kind of eccentricity published pictures that could have been anybody's.

The case for more

To be fair, the other side has a point. Abundance is useful. Being able to see forty directions in an afternoon means you can kill thirty-nine of them cheaply, and some of the best ideas come from wandering further than you would have on your own. Plenty of great work has come out of play, accident and excess. I use these tools every day and I'm not interested in pretending otherwise.

But wandering only helps if you know where home is. Without a point of view, exploring turns into scrolling.

Stay on course

So here's what I think the job is now. A one-line brand statement helps, but it's never been enough on its own. What I actually work from is a living moodboard I carry around in my head: the images, textures, references and feelings that make the brand what it is. I keep going back to it, holding each new thing up against it and feeling it out. Does this belong in that world? Does it take the world somewhere better, or just somewhere else?

The moodboard has to be alive. It grows as the brand grows, and every good decision adds to it. But it also has a centre that doesn't move, and that centre is what you protect. Generative tools are brilliant at filling the edges of that board. They're no help at knowing where the centre is. That part is still yours.

So use them, and then be ruthless. Keep what deepens the world you're building and let the rest go, even the good ones. Especially the good ones, sometimes.

The Library of Babel already has every image in it. The work that matters is choosing the few that are unmistakably yours, and the confidence to leave the rest on the shelf.

Sources

• Gucci's AI images before its Milan show: AOL, February 2026
• Aerie and Pamela Anderson, "Real matters": Marketing Dive and Marketing Brew, 2026
• Equinox, Aerie and brands against AI slop: Adweek, 2026
• Iyengar and Lepper, "When Choice Is Demotivating": Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000
• Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel", 1941
• Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice, 2004
• Dieter Rams, ten principles for good design, Vitsœ

Written by Steve Salgado